This may sound harsh, and I don’t mean it to be, but one has to wonder what the city fathers and mothers of Claremont, Ca. were thinking when they decided to open the Claremont Museum of Art a few years ago.
That museum, we now know, is about to close for lack of funding.
Claremont has a population of about 38,000 and is 13.4 square miles in area. It describes itself, on its own website, as 30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles — which has a number of museums, as we know. Did Claremont really think it needed its own?
If so, it actually has its own: Claremont is home to the seven Claremont colleges, which happen to include the Pomona College Museum of Art, the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery and the Clark Humanities Museum.
In mid-November, the Los Angeles Times reported that “the museum recently laid off its full-time staff after three expected donations failed to materialize, but the galleries have remained open,” and that the city had given the Claremont Museum of Art a grant of $18,879 to stay open through this month.
Here’s another account of the museum’s status.
Recently, at a lecture in Las Vegas, Cincinnati Art Museum director Aaron Betsky was reported to have said “It is ridiculous that a city as large as this does not have a public art institution…”
In Claremont’s case, I would turn that around: It was foolhardy for Claremont, so close to major museums, with college museums within its boundaries, to spend money on a new museum.
It’s no secret that the museum infrastructure in the U.S. is overbuilt — though some of the museums are in the wrong place, given population shifts. But building museums because we can — see a 2007 article of mine in Art & Auction — isn’t the solution.